Review – One of Us is Next

From Goodreads: It is a year after the action of One of Us Is Lying, and someone has started playing a game of Truth or Dare.

But this is no ordinary Truth or Dare. This game is lethal. Choosing the truth may reveal your darkest secrets, accepting the dare could be dangerous, even deadly.

The teenagers of Bayview must work together once again to find the culprit, before it’s too late . . .

Karen M. McManus really does write interesting and well constructed mysteries this one just wasn’t one of my favourites from her. I did unfortunately find this one a little more predictable than her previous books and it did suffer from the ‘it could all be solved if someone just told an adult’ curse.

However, I did enjoy reading it. I liked that we got glimpses of older characters while the mystery focused on new characters and I did enjoy the strangers on the train style reveal, but what happened and ‘who-dun-it’ was kind of obvious from about half way through. I did feel the pacing was rather slow. We took a while to build up to what actually was happening then it sort of went quiet for a bit before all the action happened in the last few chapters. I found the truth or dare aspects interesting, the truths that were revealed did feel realistic and very teenage worries which really made the characters feel more realistic.

McManus is very good at constructing authentic feeling teenagers and their reactions to what is happening does feel real therefore makes the whole story a lot more engaging as I found myself getting invested in the narrator characters.

Overall I think this was a nice continuation to the Bayview story and was an easy and enjoyable read.